Ogden • A day after an Ogden police officer shot and wounded a man, police officials were not able to detail what led the officer to fire his weapon.
Chief Eric Young said the officer — who has been on the Ogden force for less than two years — rushed from the police department to an area a few blocks away where witnesses had told 911 that a man was holding a knife to a woman’s throat.
The officer fired four times at 32-year-old Casey Pacheco, according to Young, and two bullets struck the man. He is recovering in a local hospital.
But what happened before the police shooting remains unclear. Young said he did not know if Pacheco rushed toward the officer or threatened the officer in any way. And he is not aware if Pacheco had the knife to the woman’s throat when the officer arrived, or if the man had threatened her with it in front of the officer. The officer was not injured.
Young said there is no body camera footage of the encounter, because the officer who ran to his patrol car after hearing about the 911 call did not grab it.
But Young said he is confident that the Weber County Attorney’s Office and his department will be able to conduct full reviews of the shooting without it.
“I’ve been a police officer for 30 years,” he said. “We did about 15 or 20 of those years without body-worn cameras. They were thorough, objective investigations. You don’t have to have body-worn cameras to tell the whole story.”
The chief noted that there were several witnesses who saw the shooting, including a construction crew that was working in the 200 block of 26th Street, which is currently closed because of construction.
Young noted that he didn’t know many of the details surrounding Monday’s shooting because he said his department won’t be investigating the shooting. That goes to a team at the county attorney’s office, which routinely handles cases where an officer opens fire.
Young said the officer was put on administrative leave, which also is standard after a police shooting. The officer has not been identified.
This marks the 26th police shooting in Utah this year, according to a Salt Lake Tribune database, and it is the second in Ogden.
